Author: Tel Team

Turnitin scheduled maintenance on July 26th

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Turnitin have informed us of scheduled maintenance on July 26th, as follows:

“The Turnitin service may be unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, July 26th, 2014, from 9 AM to 9 PM U.S. Pacific Time (click for local time). We will be making significant upgrades to improve capacity and scalability as our service utilization grows. An announcement will appear for users within Turnitin in advance of when the system will be unavailable for this scheduled maintenance. This maintenance will affect Turnitin and TurnitinUK users. Instructors are encouraged to modify assignment due dates either before or at least several hours after the scheduled maintenance window.”

Turnitin also provides updates via the Turnitin System Status page or via Twitter at @TurnitinStatus.

Blackboard upgrade – summer 2014

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The 2014 Blackboard upgrade will take place between Tuesday 22nd July and Friday 25th July. A temporary read-only replacement service will be available during this time. Please do not edit courses after Sunday 20th July until the upgrade is complete. Edits made during this time will not be saved. The last date to request external accounts before the upgrade is Friday 18th July, by 4pm.

The familiar interface remains in the new version (which is known as SP14), but there are improvements in the student and staff experience, particularly in relation to online submission and marking.

Once again, the content of this year’s unit courses will be copied into 2014-15 versions from 1st August. This means that you may see 2013 as well as 2014 courses on Blackboard. Historic and current versions are clearly identified by a year suffix.

Further information and short videos on some of the new features can be found on the Blackboard Upgrade website.

If you have any questions please contact tel-help@bristol.ac.uk

Update on network and service outage – 3 July

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Update from IT Services:

At 12 noon today there was a power outage that affected network facilities and the data centre in the Computer Centre.  This outage had the effect of removing network access across the University and making the majority of online services unavailable, including the University website.

Power came back very quickly but both the network and services needed to be restarted. The network was restored at around 12:45 . Individual services were restored as soon as possible thereafter. The majority of services were back by around 14:00.

Most services are now back with the exception of the Library and IT Services websites. Staff who access their Gmail via the IT Services website are advised to do so via the University portal, MyBristol.

As the IT Services website is currently unavailable we will continue to provide updates via the IT Services Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/uob.it and Twitter account @BristolUniIT.
If you are experiencing any ongoing problems please contact the IT Service Desk (service-desk@bristol.ac.uk / 0117 92 87870) for assistance.

Blackboard and QMP upgrades and other TEL developments

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There are a number of technology enhanced learning (TEL) developments happening this year, including upgrades of both Blackboard and Questionmark during the summer. 

The Blackboard upgrade will take place between Tuesday 22nd July and Friday 25th July. Questionmark will be upgraded during the week beginning Monday 11th August.

Further information is on the TEL website.

Turnitin report problem when moving files

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Turnitin has identified an issue with the paper “Move To” feature in the assignment inbox which may affect Instructors. It is prompting users to delete papers instead of move them. Turnitin are working on a fix. They advise users to click “Cancel” on the prompt and avoid using this feature until it has been fixed.

If you have any concerns or queries please contact tel-help@bristol.ac.uk

Blackboard unavailable – 18th March 7 – 7.15am

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On Tuesday 18th March Blackboard will be unavailable for 15 minutes between 7 and 7.15am.

During this time our colleagues in Information Services will be applying a minor fix to the system which will address issues users have been experiencing when accessing Blackboard via Internet Explorer 11.

If you have any questions please email TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk

 

Important update – Wimba Create licence

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The licence code for Wimba Create will expire on 12 March 2014. To address this, all instances of Wimba Create on University-managed PCs will be automatically upgraded to the latest and final release of Wimba Create (v2.6.1) over the next few days. This version includes the new licence code.

This means users do not need to do anything. If, however, your instance of Wimba Create or its licence code does not upgrade automatically, the advice is to log out of your machine at the end of the day but leave it switched on. This is because updates are pushed out during the night. If after several attempts at this you still do not have the latest version or licence code, contact service-desk@bristol.ac.uk.

Users with Wimba Create installed on non-University PCs, such as personal computers at home, can get the latest version of the software and licence code from the Blackboard course called ‘Wimba Create’. For  information on how to access that, visit http://www.bris.ac.uk/esu/e-learning/support/tools/wimba/.

Users should also note that the newer version of Wimba Create presents no changes for end users. The key difference is that it works with MS Office up to 2013 (rather than 2010).